Is a non-zero

blurRadius

required for

Shadow

to be visible? I am just trying to use shadow in a TextStyle. If I don’t specify a non-zero blur radius, there is no shadow. This seems unexpected. I’d expect to be able to use shadow without blur. I’m on compose

1.2.0-alpha02

cc @Siyamed @Sean McQuillan [G]

can you please create a ticket?

Sure, will do tomorrow morning

I have filed https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/219552739

I think this is WAI. You are specifying the radius of the shadow in this case. If you pass 0 then no shadow will be rendered

Correct me if I’m wrong but doesn’t the radius only apply to the blur?

That indicates the size, so zero would be zero here

Ok thanks for responding. Feel free to close the ticket. I suppose as a workaround one could just create two

Text

nodes, one of them with an offset. If no-blur shadow was desired.

That would work if you just wanted to offset the content

I’m not sure I follow what you mean. What is the content you’re referring to, just the text?

Yes the text in this case

Ok. Yeah to be clear all I mean is:

val text = "my text"
Text(
  text = text,
  modifier = Modifier.offset(-4f, 4f),
)
Text(
  text = text,
)

I think this should produce a basic shadow with no blur

Yup that seems reasonable

Or provide a very small blur?

I don't think that was what the API was intended for to be honest. It looks more like the OP was looking to render the same exact content just rendered offset slightly which is different from a shadow

With my zero knowledge of graphics, distance is the offset in this use case

So to be clear here the shadows that I was referring to are the RenderNode based shadows as part of

Modifier.graphicsLayer

the shadow API that is used on text is part of Paint.setShadowLayer which behaves differently. The latter actually existed before the former however has had different levels of support as Android evolved from being software rendered to hardware rendered and moving away from and back to Skia as the underlying graphics framework

thanks

Yeah thanks for the context!

CSS can generate shadows that are not consistent from a physical standpoint

While this is true, the reality is many designer tools and other UI toolkits on other platforms handle shadows this way (not the Android single-light source way), so it’s reasonable to have this confusion with Android development when the mockup says “build this shadow but make it hard and not blurry” and the APIs + rendered results look different.